By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

I love the Christmas decorating season. It's the one time of year when a guy can really sit back and watch.

Each year my wife does a fantastic job of transforming our house into a festive place, filled with dozens of nice little touches that range from holiday bath towels to red-and-white coffee cups.

Seemingly (and sometimes literally) overnight, little villages spring up in our living room, cranberry-red candles settle into available table-top spaces and wreaths of various origins start growing on doors.

While I reap the pleasure of all those treats, none of it is my doing.

"If I wasn't here, you wouldn't do anything for the holidays, would you?" my wife asked one night while she was putting lights on the tree and I was clicking channels.

"Not true," I said. "You know that I always like to buy that special Christmas beer from Mexico, Bueno Noche." It is said to be brewed from carefully aged hops dredged from the side of the vat during an annual end-of-the-year cleaning, and it's worth every extra penny if you can find a shop that isn't selling last year's batch.

Beyond the beer, however, I had to admit that Christmas decorating was best left to those with a special knack for it, which pretty much leaves me out.

Don't get me wrong. I'm filled with the Christmas spirit. I love the way the tree smells, the lights twinkle, and the bells jingle. It's just that I don't have enough initiative to make any of that happen on my own.

If it were up to me, all that stuff would just show up on the day after Christmas, shipped in from a special warehouse storage facility just south of the North Pole.

My wife, on the other hand, knows the provenance of every single Christmas touch we have. She can tell me that the little wooden train set came from our visit to a Nuremberg toy factory we visited in 1987.

She remembers that the little reindeer votive candles came from a San Francisco shopping trip before Macy's ever came to Honolulu.

And she knows that my cherished Coors can/Christmas tree ornament originated at a party in Guam that she'd wishes she didn't remember.

I do have at least one holiday task I tackle every year.

That's the job of getting all the ornaments, lights and other things down from the attic. This year, unfortunately, I was missing in action when the moment of need finally arrived. I'm not sure, but I think I was either out playing tennis or haunting specialty liquor stores looking for a 12-pack of Bueno Noche.

In any case, it was my wife who got the pleasure of climbing the ladder and scrambling across the flimsy canec ceiling in search of this year's Christmas cheer.

I was allowed, however, to actually put up the lights outside of the house, a job that was made easier this year by the fact some of them were never actually taken down after Christmas 2002.

Reach Mike Leidemann at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.